February 13, 2009

It seems, NetBeans has been making waves (or rather tsunami?) in the PHP world. According to the article “The Big PHP IDE Test“, NetBeans, a new kid to the PHP land is found to provide almost all the features of established commercial PHP IDEs like Aptana Pro ($99), Zend Studio ($399) at the best cost possible ($0) :-) .

Great news and thank you NetBeans team for making the “Only IDE you need” available to PHP folks with many advanced features.

February 11, 2009

Whether you are new to NetBeans or not, NetBeans wiki is a great place to find many NetBeans related tips and tricks. It is from here that I learned about installing NetBeans IDE in Ubuntu when I switched from Windows. Not only that, I keep coming back to these wikis whenever I need some help with NetBeans IDE.

But since NetBeans adoption is growing at such a rapid rate, it’s no surprise that the number of NetBeans wikis has grown exponentially too. Yes, there is an inbuilt search function to help you find what you want, but if you want to search something very quickly, then you might find goosh very useful.

Goosh is a shell or terminal or command line interface to access google services. To use goosh, just open your browser and then point it to “goosh.org“. Now you can search the NetBeans wiki pages damn quickly by entering the command “site wiki.netbeans.org <your search term>”. For example, if you want to find a solution to solve the garbled text problem you face when using NetBeans on Ubuntu, you would enter “site wiki.netbeans.org garbled text” in the goosh terminal.

I recently came across a nice little tool called “goosh” or “The unofficial Google Shell”. It resembles a linux shell (or terminal) and provides a “command line interface” on the web for many google services. This means that you can just open and read your mails very fast by typing just 2 commands: “login” and then “gmail”. That’s it, your mails are loaded damn fast and this is what you might want if you are in a hurry!

And goosh provides some cool facilities like searching wikipedia, news, rss feeds, blogs etc etc with simple to use (and remember) commands. Let’s see some of goosh’s firepower in action.

February 4, 2009

Now that you have upgraded from Windows to Ubuntu (like me :-) ), let’s see how to setup NetBeans quickly on your new Ubuntu machine without wasting much time.

Step 1: Install JDK

Install jdk on your machine using the super easy install option in Ubuntu. Open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

This will install the latest jdk available in the Ubuntu repository. This is cool because, you need not worry about updating your jdk whenever a new release is available. Your system’s “Update Manager” will take care of the rest.

Once the jdk is downloaded, you will be prompted to agree a license agreement in the terminal. Press “TAB” key to select the “Ok” option and then press “Enter”.

Long long ago (about 6 months back), I registered my blog in planetnetbeans.org. Whenever I post a blog entry about netbeans and file it in my “netbeans” category, I use to check whether it appears in planetnetbeans.org. It never appeared.

I even sent a mail to the support team explaining my frustration. They asked me to register my blog again. I did exactly the same. Another 3 months passed without any fruitful result.

To my surprise, as I was casually surfing planetnetbeans.org today, I found my blog being listed there. :-)